Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders (11 page)

The moment cut into Ryan's Fox interview, and he watched the scene on the monitor that sat on the table. Somehow in his mind that made it official. Durling really was dead, and now he really was the President, and that was that. The camera in the room caught Ryan's face as it changed, as he remembered how Durling had brought him in, trusted him, leaned on him, guided him. . . .

That was it, Jack realized. He'd always had someone to lean on before. Sure, others had leaned on him, asked his opinion, given him his head in a crisis, but there was always someone to come back to, to tell him he'd done the right thing. He could do that now, but what he'd receive in return would be just opinions, not judgments. The judgments were his now. He'd hear all manner of things. His advisers would be like lawyers, some arguing one way, some arguing another, to tell him how he was both right and wrong at the same time, but when it was all over, the decision was his alone.

President Ryan's hand rubbed his face, heedless of the makeup, which he smeared. He didn't know that what Fox and the other networks were sending out was split-screened now, since all had access to the pool feed from the Roosevelt Room. His head shook slightly from side to side in the way of a man who had to accept something he didn't like, his face too blank now for sadness. Behind the Capitol steps, the cranes started dipping again.

“Where do we go from here?” the Fox reporter asked. That question wasn't on his list. It was just a human reaction to a human scene. The cut to the Hill had bitten deep into the allotted time for the interview, and for another subject they would have carried over into the next segment, but the rules in the White House were adamantine.

“Quite a lot of work to be done,” Ryan answered.

“Thank you, Mr. President. Fourteen minutes after the hour.”

Jack watched the light on the TV camera blink off. The originating producer waited a few seconds before waving his hand, and the President detached his microphone and cable. His first press marathon was over. Before leaving the room, he looked more carefully at the cameras. Earlier in his life he'd taught classes in history, and more recently he'd delivered briefings, but all of those had gone to a live audience whose eyes he could see and read, and from their reaction he would adjust his delivery somewhat, speeding up or slowing down, maybe tossing in a little humor if circumstances allowed, or repeating something to make his point clearer. Now his intimate chats would be directed to a thing. Something else not to like. Ryan left the room, while all over the world, people evaluated what they'd seen of the new American President. Television commentators would discuss him in fifty or more countries while he found the bathroom again.

“T
HIS IS THE
best thing that's happened to our country since
Jefferson
.” The older man rated himself a serious student of history. He liked Thomas Jefferson for his statement about how a country governed least was governed best, which was about all he knew of the adages from the Sage of Monticello.

“And it took a Jap to do it, looks like.” The statement was trailed by an ironic snort. Such an event could even invalidate his closely held racism. Couldn't have that, could he?

They'd been up all night—it was
5:20
local time— watching the TV news coverage, which hadn't stopped. The newsies, they noted, looked even more wasted than this Ryan guy. Time zones did have an advantage. Both had stopped drinking beer around
midnight
, and had switched to coffee two hours later when they'd both started dozing. Couldn't have that. What they saw, switching through channels downloaded on a large satellite dish outside the cabin, was like some sort of fantastic telethon, except this one wasn't about raising money for crippled children or AIDS victims or nigger schools. This one was fun. All those
Washington
bastards, must have been burned to a crisp, most of them.

“Bureaucrat barbecue,” Peter Holbrook said for the seventeenth time since 11:30, when he'd come up with his summation of the event. He'd always been the creative one in the movement.

“Aw, shit, Pete!” gasped Ernest Brown, spilling some of his coffee into his lap. It was still funny, enough so that he didn't leap immediately to his feet from the uncomfortable feeling that resulted from his slip.

“Has been a long night,” Holbrook allowed, laughing himself. They'd watched President Durling's speech for a couple of reasons. For one, all of the networks had preempted normal programs, as was usually the case for an important event; but the truth of the matter was that their satellite downlink gave them access to a total of 117 channels, and they didn't even have to switch the set off to avoid input from the government they and their friends despised. The deeper reason was that they cultivated their anger at their government, and usually watched such speeches—both men caught at least an hour a day of C-SPAN-1 and -2—to fuel those feelings, trading barbed comments back and forth every minute of a presidential speech.

“So, who is this Ryan guy, really?” Brown asked, yawning.

“Another 'crat, looks like. A bureaucrat talking bureaucrap.”

“Yeah,” judged Brown. “With nothing to back him up, Pete.”

Holbrook turned and looked at his friend. “It's really som'thin', isn't it?” With that observation he got up and walked to the bookshelves that walled the south side of his den. His copy of the Constitution was a well-thumbed pamphlet edition which he read as often as he could, so as to improve his understanding of the intent of the drafters. “You know, Pete, there's nothing in here to cover a situation like this.”

“Really?”

Holbrook nodded. “Really.”

“No shit.” That required some thought, didn't it?

“M
URDERED
?” P
RESIDENT
R
YAN
asked, still wiping the makeup off his face with wet towelettes of the same sort he'd used to clean off baby bottoms. At least it made his face feel clean when he'd finished.

“That's the preliminary indication, both from a cursory examination of the body and from a quick-and-dirty examination of the cockpit tapes.”
Murray
flipped through the notes faxed to him only twenty minutes before.

Ryan leaned back in his chair. Like much else in the Oval Office, it was new. On the credenza behind him, all of Durling's family and personal photos had been removed. The papers on the desk had been taken away for examination by the presidential secretarial staff. What remained or what had been substituted were accoutrements from White House stores. The chair at least was a good one, expensively designed to protect the back of its occupant, and it would soon be substituted for a custom-designed chair fitted to his own back by a manufacturer who performed the service for free and—remarkably— without public fanfare. Sooner or later he'd have to work in this place, Jack had decided a few minutes earlier. The secretaries were here, and it wasn't fair to make them trek across the building, up and down stairs. Sleeping in this place was another issue entirely—for the moment; that, too, had to change, didn't it? So, he thought, staring across the desk at
Murray
, murder.

“Shot?”

Dan shook his head. “Knife right in the heart, only one penetration. The wound looked to our agent to be from a thin blade, like a steak knife. From the cockpit tapes, it appears that it was done prior to takeoff. Looks like we can time-stamp that pretty exactly. From just prior to engine start-up to the moment of impact, the only voice on the tapes is the pilot. His name was Sato, a very experienced command pilot. The Japanese police have gotten a pile of data to us. It would seem that he lost a brother and a son in the war. The brother commanded a destroyer that got sunk with all hands. The son was a fighter pilot who cracked up on landing after a mission. Both on the same day or near enough. So, it was personal. Motive and opportunity, Jack,”
Murray
allowed himself to say, for they were almost alone in the office. Andrea Price was there, too. She didn't quite approve; she had not yet been told exactly how far back the two men went.

“That's pretty fast on the ID,” Price observed.

“It has to be firmed up,”
Murray
agreed. “We'll do that with DNA testing just to be sure. The cockpit tape is good enough for voice-print analysis, or so they told our agent. The Canadians have radar tapes tracking the aircraft out of their airspace, so confirming the timing of the event is simple. We have the aircraft firmly ID'd from
Guam
to
Japan
to
Vancouver
, and into the Capitol building. Like they say, it's all over but the shouting. There will be a lot of shouting. Mr. President”—Andrea Price felt better this time—“it will be at least two months before we have every lead and tidbit of information nailed down, and I suppose it's possible that we could be wrong, but for all practical purposes, in my opinion and that of our senior agents at the scene, this case is well on its way to being closed.”

“What could make you wrong?” Ryan asked.

“Potentially quite a few things, but there are practical considerations. For this to be anything other than the act of a single fanatic—no, that's not fair, is it? One very angry man. Anyway, for this to be a conspiracy, we have to assume detailed planning, and that's hard to support. How would they know the war was going to be lost, how did they know about the joint session—and if it were planned as a war operation, like the NTSB guy said, hell, ten tons of high explosives would have been simple to load aboard.”

“Or a nuke,” Jack interjected.

“Or a nuke.”
Murray
nodded. “That reminds me: the Air Force attache is going to see their nuclear-weapons-fabrication facility today. It took the Japanese a couple of days to figure out where it was. We're having a guy who knows the things flying over there right now.”
Murray
checked his notes. “Dr. Woodrow Lowell—oh, I know him. He runs the shop at Lawrence Livermore. Prime Minister Koga told our ambassador that he wants to hand over the damned things PDQ and get them the hell out of his country.”

Ryan turned his chair around. The windows behind him faced the
Washington
Monument
. That obelisk was surrounded by a circle of flagpoles, all of whose flags were at half-staff. But he could see that people were lined up for the elevator ride to the top. Tourists who'd come to D.C. to see the sights. Well, they were getting a bargain of sorts, weren't they? The Oval Office windows, he saw, were incredibly thick, just in case one of those tourists had a sniper rifle tucked under his coat. . . .

“How much of this can we release?” President Ryan asked.

“I'm comfortable with releasing a few things,”
Murray
responded.

“You sure?” Price asked.

“It's not as though we have to protect evidence for a criminal trial. The subject in the case is dead. We'll chase down all the possibilities of co-conspirators, but the evidence we let go today will not compromise that in any way. I'm not exactly a fan of publicizing criminal evidence, but the people out there want to know something, and in a case like this one, you let them have it.”

Besides
, Price thought, it makes the Bureau look good. With that silent observation, at least one government agency started returning to normal.

“Who's running this one at Justice?” she asked instead.

“Pat Martin.”

“Oh? Who picked him?” she asked. Ryan turned to see the discourse on this one.

Murray
almost blushed. “I guess I did. The President said to pick the best career prosecutor, and that's Pat. He's been head of the Criminal Division for nine months. Before that he ran Espionage. Ex-Bureau. He's a particularly good lawyer, been there almost thirty years. Bill Shaw wanted him to become a judge. He was talking to the AG about it only last week.”

“You sure he's good enough?” Jack asked. Price decided to answer.

“We've worked with him, too. He's a real pro, and Dan's right, he's real judge material, tough as hell, but also extremely fair. He handled a mob counterfeiting case my old partner ramrodded in
New Orleans
.”

“Okay, let him decide what to let out. He can start talking to the press right after lunch.” Ryan checked his watch. He'd been President for exactly twelve hours.

C
OLONEL
P
IERRE
A
LEXANDRE
, U.S. Army, retired, still looked like a soldier, tall and thin and fit, and that didn't bother the dean at all. Dave James immediately liked what he saw as his visitor took his seat, liked him even more for what he'd read in the man's c.v., and more still for what he'd learned over the phone. Colonel Alexandre—“Alex” to his friends, of which he had many—was an expert in infectious disease who'd spent twenty productive years in the employ of his government, divided mainly between
Walter
Reed
Army
Hospital
in
Washington
and
Fort
Detrick
in
Maryland
, with numerous field trips sprinkled in. Graduate of
West Point
and the University of Chicago Medical School, Dr. James saw. Good, his eyes again sweeping over the residency and other professional-experience entries. The list of published articles ran to eight single-spaced pages. Nominated for a couple of important prizes, but not lucky yet. Well, maybe
Hopkins
could change that. His dark eyes were not especially intense at the moment. By no means an arrogant man, Alexandre knew who and what he was—better yet, knew that Dean James knew.

“I know Gus Lorenz,” Dean James said with a smile. “We interned together at Peter Brent Brigham.” Which Harvard had since consolidated into Brigham and Women's.

“Brilliant guy,” Alexandre agreed in his best Creole drawl. It was generally thought that Gus's work on Lassa and Q fever put him in the running for a Nobel Prize. “And a great doc.”

“So, why don't you want to work with him in
Atlanta
? Gus tells me he wants you pretty bad.”

“Dean James—”

“Dave,” the Dean said.

“Alex,” the colonel responded. There was something to be said for civilian life, after all. Alexandre thought of the dean as a three-star equivalent. Maybe four stars. Johns Hopkins carried a lot of prestige. “Dave, I've worked in a lab damned near all my life. I want to treat patients again. CDC would just be more of the same. Much as I like Gus—we did a lot of work together in
Brazil
back in 1987; we get along just fine,” he assured the dean. “I am tired of looking at slides and printouts all the time.” And for the same reason he'd turned down one hell of an offer from Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, to head up one of their new labs. Infectious diseases were a coming thing in medicine, and both men hoped that it wasn't too late. Why the hell, James wondered, hadn't this guy made general-officer rank? Maybe politics, the dean thought. The Army had that problem, too, just as
Hopkins
did. But their loss . . .